Monday, August 11, 2008

Hello,after years that compositing has been introduced in our desktop, it's finally come the time to try it.

Uninstall fglrxMy video card is not supported very well with Mesa 7.0.x, in fact I've been using the fglrx driver for a long time.... until now!I had to manually dpkg --purge all the related packages.Now it's better to rmmod fglrx.

Install mesa 7.1 from experimentalOn #compiz-fusion some guys hinted me I should have used Mesa 7.1rc because of recent improvements on my video card. The only way to get such version was to include experimental sources.Ok, no problem, if it doesn't work I can downgrade back to the previous one.

Upgrade xorg to experimentalBut there're still problems, I had to upgrade to the latest xorg in experimental because of mesa compatibility. In fact AIGLX couldn't load DRI drivers because of missing symbols.I had to dpkg -l|grep xorg the install the one by one. I did pray for everything to work, really.Now backup xorg.conf and go ahead with X -configure.

Install compizconfig-settings-managerand compiz-fusion-plugins-extraFor some reason, the first time I've tried running compiz it's gone Segmentation Fault. On the IRC channel they hinted me to install the crash handler plugin to back track the error. After installing such packages, magically compiz --replace worked!Now I have a GNOME Desktop with the Blue-Joy theme and the Avant Window Navigator.

Everything both nice and unuseful, but now I understand how eye-candy fancy stuff can change your desktop.

Hello,while I was playing with apt-cache I've discovered a new kind of main menu in GNOME. It's being developed by SuSE. It feels nice, robust and innovative.The screenshot is showing the documents tab.To install, aptitude install gnome-main-menu and add the new applet.

Hello,I've been using qemu a lot lately because I'm creating an usb hdd with debian live.The image contains a system running postgresql, development packages for gtk and python and gnome-core . All this ends up loading in more than 5 minutes, this is really boring.

Then I begun looking for a faster virtualization system, and found KVM. Unfortunately my processor hasn't the right flag for it.

Finally I found kqemu, which is a module for the kernel that speeds up a lot qemu. I never thought it could speed up things...... so.... much!Let's install it:

m-a a-i kqemumodprobe kqemu

That's it, for those who owns an amd64 processor, this is the right way to use kqemu:

qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel-kqemu [your options]

You shouldn't get any error, if you do... boh.

The image now boots in 33 seconds down to the bottom init scripts, and GNOME works only with a slight delay but it's definitely a great speed up. With the real machine, I enter gnome in about 40 seconds.

Keep going the good work Qemu team, and thanks as usual to everyone who helped me on IRC.